Create and Customize Your YouTube Channel

Sign in YouTube using your personal Google account or corporate account if you don’t want your business channel to be tied to your personal mail.

Use the name of your business or product as a channel name unless you are promoting your brand as a sole entrepreneur.

Once you’ve created a channel, customize the background banner and icon. You need high-resolution images that resonate with your brand and can communicate its values to channel viewers. For a business channel, you can use the company’s logo as an icon. Note that it will be displayed in searches and on subscribers’ sidebars. If you are a sole entrepreneur, you should add a good portrait photo as a channel avatar.

If you promote your brand across multiple social media platforms, think about using consistent design elements in all accounts.

Go to the “About” section and write a channel description. Here you can tell your audience about your brand mission and welcome new people on your channel. Don’t be shy! In several compelling sentences, explain what makes your brand unique and how your videos will benefit viewers. In the description, use as many keywords as looks natural and put the most important one close to the first sentences.

Include links to your company website and social media accounts. Invite everyone to follow you on social platforms and subscribe to a newsletter (if you have this option on your website). Make sure you also indicate the email for business correspondence.

Share your posting schedule to let your viewers know when to expect new videos. Posting at least four videos every month works best for most popular channels. Set your own posting schedule and stick to it with commitment if you want to build a loyal community of subscribers on YouTube.

In the “Featured channels” and “Liked videos” sections you can highlight influencers’ accounts and other relevant content. Just make sure that the videos are not controversial and the featured channels not directly competitive to yours.

Make a Trailer

An effective trailer is the number one promotion tool for any business channel. It gives you an opportunity to convince your future audience that your content is worth subscribing to and give them a small preview. YouTube does not display ads during trailers, so there will be no distractions for the viewers.

A good trailer will be short (1-2 minutes) and informative. Assume that the viewers don’t know anything about you and your business. How can you hook them in during the first 5 seconds? The principle “show, don’t tell” works best here.

Be warm and personal. Tell viewers why you decided to set up this channel and what they can expect to find in it. Encourage them to subscribe and leave comments. Add annotations and use fragments of your videos for more engagement.

Add Videos and Make Playlists

First, what makes a good YouTube video? There are several points to consider:

Make your intros short and deliver value right away. People often compare the lengths of videos when choosing the one to watch. Focus on your key message and don’t get carried away with empty talk.

Use end screens in the last seconds of your clips. They will encourage viewers to continue browsing your content. We recommend making original and consistent visuals for intros and end screens. Stick to them across all your videos to enhance the value of your brand on YouTube.

Evoke emotions and show off some personality. You will need to research your target audience beforehand and create every video with their preferences in mind. Do not copy the style and ideas from other YouTubers or your channel will look generic. Add a decent amount of humor and a hint of self-irony.

Choose a good camera and make high-quality audio. Even if you are using a smartphone camera for videos, invest into a good microphone. Most viewers will click off the video that has lousy sound.

Take care of lightning. Be very intentional in choosing the backgrounds for your videos.

End your videos with calls to subscribe to your channel. Point to your other videos or playlists.

Create a large and compelling thumbnail! It will serve as a video preview, so make sure it speaks to your target audience and focuses on the central message of the clip. Add original design elements and fonts to make the thumbnail more clickable. But don’t overdo! Also, check how your thumbnail looks on a smaller mobile screen.

Organise your videos into playlists to make your viewers stay on your channel longer and subscribe. It is a good idea to create separate playlists for different segments of your target audience.

Start with a “New to this channel?” playlist where you deliver your most popular and entertaining videos. With this one, you will convert random video searchers into subscribers.

Problem-solving playlists will focus on the different needs your subscribers have. Make sure that every playlist benefits them in a particular way.

Topic-related playlists that include a comprehensive set of videos on a particular matter work best for content bingers. Such viewers are most consistent and loyal, so make sure your channel offers several nicely organized collections to them.

There are several types of videos that work best for business channels:

Product videos and announcements. Show off your best merchandise, highlight its most important features, and give a preview of what’s coming next.

Make product reviews and comparisons. Don’t be afraid to show your expertise and act as an industry influencer.

Create videos about special offers, sales, and other promotional campaigns.

Film touching and personal customer stories. Interview your biggest customers on camera to enhance social proof.

Document your brand story and highlight the most important milestones in the company’s history.

Make useful “How to” videos and give tips on how to accomplish tasks that are related to your products.

Make videos where you discuss important matters with other influencers in your industry.

Film an inspirational video about people who can serve as role models for your target audience. It doesn’t have to deal directly with your products; instead, it should evoke deep emotions in your viewers.

Holiday greeting and themed videos. Dedicate a video to upcoming holidays or some other particular topic that is in the news and relates to your industry.

Funny videos are assets in themselves. Entertain your subscribers and show a positive attitude to your business.

Make a contest among your subscribers and collect clips from them! Posting user-generated content on your channel will help you build a healthy community.

Create series of videos on a particular topic. Subscribers love to browse big collections of clips.

Start a crowdfunding campaign for a good cause that has to do with your brand values and promote the campaign with a series of videos.

Research Keywords and Optimise Your Channel

Start with researching relevant keyword combinations on YouTube. Enter the first keyword that is most relevant to your niche and examine the suggested results. Add letters from A to Z after the keyword to see what results pop up. Write down the combinations that your find optimal.

Go to Tags for YouTube Google service and find out which titles and meta tags are employed by your competitors. Enter these keywords into Google AdWords, choose the “Video” format, and analyze the results. To get even more insight, run several URLs of high-ranking videos in your niche through Keyword Planner.

Social Media Mistakes And How To Avoid Them [Free Ebook]

Once you’ve come up with a set of keywords, use them wisely across your channel:

First, add keywords to the channel description in the “About” section.

Use relevant keywords in every video title. Also, make sure your titles are about 70 characters long and catchy enough to ensure clicks. Don’t be afraid to use keyword synonyms in your titles; you don’t have to repeat the same headline over and over.

Write video descriptions to give a brief overview of each clip. YouTube needs much information about your video to rank it high in the search. Speak to your viewers in a warm, conversational manner, include several CTAs and 1-2 links to your other resources or accounts. Insert keywords into the text naturally and keep the most important one closer to the beginning. In the descriptions, do not hesitate to ask questions and encourage comments!

Create transcripts for your videos and ensure that the keywords you are using are voiced in the videos. Note that Google crawls only manually crafted and uploaded transcripts. Also, think about translating your popular videos into several languages and adding subtitles.

Add categories and tags to every video, but do not overuse them. Work with the most relevant keywords that you’ve determined during the research phase. Create tags that are unique to your business (like your brand and product names) and use them everywhere. Always keep an eye on your competitors to know which keywords bring traffic to videos similar to yours.

Don’t forget to use keywords when naming your playlists!

Integrate Your YouTube Channel With Social Media

Now that you have fantastic content on your YouTube channel, you need to deliver it right to your potential subscribers, convert them, and enhance loyalty. Social media will help you out.

Post your videos on different social networks. Remember that if you want your YouTube subscribers to follow you on other social media, you need to deliver different content on your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts. This means that you can’t just cross-promote the same videos on all platforms, you need to all publish something unique in each network.

On every social platform, write a unique brand description in the “About” section and add links to a YouTube playlist where you have gathered your most popular videos.

Find out which hashtags that are trending in your niche and use them when publishing your videos on social media.

Encourage all viewers and influencers (by contacting the personally) to share your videos on social media. Thank people who shared your content whenever it is possible.

If you already run a business blog on your website, make sure you embed your videos into blog posts. Also, encourage other bloggers to embed your videos by adding such CTAs into video descriptions.

Make sure that ALL your video descriptions contain links to your social media accounts.

How can you choose the most effective social media platform to promote your video content?

Facebook users adore video content, so this platform is ideal for raising brand awareness. Publish a video that Facebook users will like and share because of its value, and your audience will significantly expand in weeks. On the other hand, the video that no longer receives likes immediately disappears from all timelines and can’t be searched from outside.

Instagram allows creating daily stories with static images and videos that are played as a slideshow. This is a terrific way to promote snippets of live videos or short video series combined with visual content. Also, note that Instagram has a comparatively young audience and offers little opportunity to draw visitors to your website.

Posts on Twitter also have a very limited shelf-life because thousands of tweets are published every second. However, Twitter claims that videos are their most shared type of content.

You should use Pinterest to promote your channel by turning your videos into beautiful images that contain links to the full clips on YouTube. Organize your images into collections around high-volume keywords.

Use Paid Advertising

Advertised videos get on average five times more views. Here are some tips you can use if you decide to go for an AdWords advertising campaign:

Don’t put much emphasis on non-skippable bumper ads because they have higher video abandonment rates and most Youtubers hate them. However, if you want to reach mobile users, this type of ads will be most cost-effective.

Start your campaign with TrueView in-stream ads which are shown at the beginning of a video. These ads are the most common, and people often watch them to the end. In-stream ads are usually used to send traffic back to a website and increase the number of channel subscribers.

Use TrueView video discovery ads that appear as thumbnails and texts in search listings, video overlays, and related videos sections. If you have fantastic and thoroughly optimised videos, you can promote them with this type of ads. You can choose to be charged on a “cost-per-click basis” when people begin to watch your videos.

And one more thing, how can you make a good ad video? There are several ideas you can use:

Start with introducing your company and speaking about its mission.

Let people know that you understand their pains points and intend to benefit them with your product.

Quote what customers say about their problems and then explain why you decided to create your excellent solution.

Highlight and explain in detail the features that your products have. Be highly visual, practical and demonstrate your products in action.

Add a call to action. After you’ve shown off your products, encourage people to buy them or sign up for your service.

Consider possible objections and answer them respectfully. People will see that you have already thought everything over and can have a fair discussion about your products.